#794892 on autogen by Valentin Lorentz: use a constant time as timeout instead of measuring how long it takes for ./configure to run, use C locale when sorting, and use UTC when converting dates. Upstream made a new pre-release providing a --enable-timeout option. Date related issues will need more work to have portable solutions.

Lunar reported an issue on an unstable ABI from a generated header in icedove reminding of an issue affecting libical-dev. The bug has since been fixed by Carsten Schoenert.
akira identified an unreferenced embeded code copy (causing unreproducibility!) in gperf.
reproducible.debian.net
The scheduler has temporarily been changed to not schedule any already tested
packages for sid and experimental, due to the the GCC 5 transitions, which are well
visible in our
graphs now.
On the plus side this has caused our stretch testing to catch up (and improve
stats). (h01ger)
depwait packages (packages where the Build-Depends cannot be satisfied) are now listed in the last 24h and last 48h pages (Mattia Rizzolo)
Two new amd64 build nodes (with 8 cores and 32 GB RAM each) have been added, kindly sponsored by Profitbricks. (h01ger)
The 4 armhf (setup last week by Vagrant Cascadian) and 2 amd64 build nodes have been made available to Jenkins. Remote job scheduling has been implemented and 35 new jobs have been added for pbuilder and schroot creation and maintenance of the nodes. (h01ger)
The manual scheduler gained a flag (-a/--architecture) to select which arch to schedule in. (Mattia Rizzolo)
armhf will only be testing stretch for now, due to limited hardware ressources. (h01ger)
The page listing maintainers of unreproducible packages gained internal anchors. As an example, one can now link to unreproducible orphaned packages. (Mattia Rizzolo)
Packages with a bug tagged pending are marked using a new symbol: a brown P (Mattia Rizzolo)
diffoscope development
debbindiff is now called diffoscope! It also has a website at diffoscope.org. The name was changed to better reflect that it became a general purpose tool, capable of comparing many different archive formats, or directories.
Version 29 is the renaming release. Amongst a couple of other cosmetic changes a favicon showing the new logo has been added to the generated HTML reports.
Version 30 replaces the file matching algorithm for files listed in .changes to a smarter one that removes only the version number. It also fixes a bug where squashfs directories were being extracted even if their content was being compared at a later stage. It also fixes an issue with the test suite that was detected by debci.
Documentation update
More rationale have been added for supporting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
The unfinished Reproducible Builds HOWTO is now visible on the web, feedback and patches most welcome.
Package reviews
261 obsolete
reviews have
been removed, 73 added and 145 updated this week.

reproducible.debian.net
Four armhf build hosts were provided by Vagrant Cascadian and have been configured to be used by jenkins.debian.net. Work on including armhf builds in the reproducible.debian.net webpages has begun. So far the repository comparison page just shows us which armhf binary packages are currently missing in our repo. (h01ger)
The scheduler has been changed to re-schedule more packages from stretch than sid, as the gcc5 transition has started This mostly affects build log age. (h01ger)
A new depwait status has been introduced for packages which can't be built because of missing build dependencies. (Mattia Rizzolo)
debbindiff development
Finally, on August 31st, Lunar released debbindiff 27 containing a complete overhaul of the code for the comparison stage. The new architecture is more versatile and extensible while minimizing code duplication. libarchive is now used to handle cpio archives and iso9660 images through the newly packaged python-libarchive-c. This should also help support a couple other archive formats in the future. Symlinks and devices are now properly compared. Text files are compared as Unicode after being decoded, and encoding differences are reported. Support for Sqlite3 and Mono/.NET executables has been added. Thanks to Valentin Lorentz, the test suite should now run on more systems. A small defiency in unquashfs has been identified in the process. A long standing optimization is now performed on Debian package: based on the content of the md5sums control file, we skip comparing files with matching hashes. This makes debbindiff usable on packages with many files. Fuzzy-matching is now performed for files in the same container (like a tarball) to handle renames. Also, for Debian .changes, listed files are now compared without looking the embedded version number. This makes debbindiff a lot more useful when comparing different versions of the same package.
Based on the rearchitecturing work has been done to allow parallel processing. The branch now seems to work most of the time. More test needs to be done before it can be merged.
The current fuzzy-matching algorithm, ssdeep, has showed disappointing results. One important use case is being able to properly compare debug symbols. Their path is made using the Build ID. As this identifier is made with a checksum of the binary content, finding things like CPP macros is much easier when a diff of the debug symbols is available. Good news is that TLSH, another fuzzy-matching algorithm, has been tested with much better results. A package is waiting in NEW and the code is ready for it to become available.
A follow-up release 28 was made on August 2nd fixing content label used for gzip2, bzip2 and xz files and an error on text files only differing in their encoding. It also contains a small code improvement on how comments on Difference object are handled.
This is the last release name debbindiff. A new name has been chosen to better reflect that it is not a Debian specific tool. Stay tuned!
Documentation update
Valentin Lorentz updated the patch submission template to suggest to write the kind of issue in the bug subject.
Small progress have been made on the Reproducible Builds HOWTO while preparing the related CCCamp15 talk.
Package reviews
235 obsolete
reviews have
been removed, 47 added and 113 updated this week.
42 reports for packages failing to build from source have been made by Chris West (Faux).
New issue added this week: haskell_devscripts_locale_substvars.
Misc.
Valentin Lorentz wrote a script to report packages tested as unreproducible installed on a system. We encourage everyone to run it on their systems and give feedback!

20 June 2015

Guillem Jover uploaded dpkg/1.18.0 which now uses an approximation to compute Installed-Size, making it indpendent from the underlying filesystem. It now always sort the Dpkg::Dist::Files files list on output to make the output stable with parallel builds.